CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Charlotte artists now have a new place to be creative.
The city’s first graffiti park opened today in NoDa. Owners say it offers them a place to express themselves without risk of getting in trouble for painting in public.
The park was created through the city’s opportunity fund grant that poured $1.2 million into the Charlotte art scene.
TAOH Outdoor Gallery is for creatives of any kind.
“There aren’t really many limits to what creativity can be expressed here,” said co-owner Osiris Rain. “This idea has been going for years. It came from traveling to first off to Barcelona. They have a park called Park of the 3 to 3 Chimneys. That’s this beautiful industrial space, very similar to this. And I knew immediately that we had to have one here.”
Rain and partner Sydney Duarte are the masterminds behind the project. They received $40,000 from the grant to build the park. Rain says it only took a little over a week.
“It’s so hard with this modern area of disconnect and phones and what have you to come and have a one-on-one conversation with those of a like mind and be able to have that connection of community and to experiment, collaborate and to not just for the creative side, just to have that healthy interaction with people on a one on one,” Rain said.
The park is made up of more than 20 walls that can easily be painted over, relocated, and reassembled.
Anyone is welcome to come and express themselves, Duarte says.
“We’re encouraging everybody to think of their masterpiece as a sandcastle because there are only so many walls and they will get painted over eventually. But if you think of your sandcastle, you pour all of your love into it knowing that it will get washed away,” she said.
John Harrison says seeing the area blew him away.
“If you had told me some 20 years ago that this would be a thing in Charlotte, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Harrison is an assistant professor of illustration at Winthrop University. He brought a few students to be part of the moment.
“We’ve already had people from Colorado, from California, from Louisiana, we’ve had someone from the UK, from Australia. Like they’re coming from everywhere because they don’t have a space like that in their community. We’ve already had two people from other countries reach out like, How do I get you guys here to build another space like this? So it’s blowing up quickly, which is amazing,” Duarte says.
Despite the grant, organizers are still encouraging people to donate to their cause.
“The importance of donations happening is so that we can fund younger artists that couldn’t afford paint. So we can host workshops so that we can teach artists that are just starting out how to actually make a career out of it, how to in can’t control how to do the business side of things. Most artists, they’re good at the art side, but they don’t even know where to begin as far as contracts go, how to promote themselves, how to actually we want to get rid of the starving artists mindset,” Duarte says.
The park will be at 2200 N. Brevard Street until February before organizers have to move locations. Duarte and Rain are encouraging the community to come and express themselves while they can.
“We grew up in a space where adults told you like, you need to get a real job, you can’t be an art, cannot be a career, but it’s not true,” Duarte says.
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